Modern home appliances or white good devices tend to incorporate an increasing amount of smartness. One possible future smart aspect of home appliances could be the ability to adapt its behavior to particular content, i.e. to the items that are within the home appliance. A washing machine, for example, may be able to adapt its washing program in accordance with the particular laundry that is supplied to the machine and the kind of detergent that is intended to be used.
For such a washing machine, at least two communications with the physical world would be necessarily foreseen. In order to calculate the optimal washing program, the machine needs to obtain information on at least (a) the characteristics of the particular laundry and (b) the washing powder or detergent. If necessary, the machine could prompt the user to apply a different washing powder or to remove some clothes or other items of laundry that are not compatible with the calculated program.
One way for the washing machine to obtain the needed information could be to read it from RFID-tags attached e.g. to the respective pieces of laundry and to the detergent box or container. The RFID-tags or labels of the respective pieces of laundry would then have to contain corresponding typical fabric characteristics, like washing and ironing instructions. Similarly, the RFID-tag of the detergent box would have to contain information identifying the particular detergent product and its characteristics.
When the pieces of laundry are supplied into the machine, an RFID-reader could detect each corresponding tag and read the data contents of the tag. Similarly, the box with washing powder could be held close to another RFID reader to let the machine know the kind of detergent that is intended to be used.
For obtaining these two information streams, the machine would need two antennas, e.g. a standard NFC (Near Field Communication) antenna like the ones applied in standard card readers to read the RFID-tag of the detergent box, and another antenna provided around the entrance opening of the machine to read the tags of the laundry items. These antennas are connected to respective dedicated reader ICs which are subsequently connected to a control unit.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,973,645 B1 describes an RFID reader device connected to a plurality of RFID antenna modules and comprising an RF signal generator and a select signal generator. The select signal generator is operable to select one or more of the plurality of RFID antenna modules.
There may be a need for a simple and inexpensive way for e.g. a home appliance or white good device to communicate with RFID-tags of various items.